Sir, Two central issues are at stake in the debate about the Education Bill structures of control and the nature of education. Most comment, your own recent leader included, has regrettably tended to reduce the debate to the single issue of power and control.
Wider participation by parents and teachers in the management of schools is clearly desirable. If the State needs greater oversight of and right to intervene in the affairs of schools subsidised by the taxpayer, this need should be met. But how real is the need? And are the highly bureaucratic and expensive regional boards envisaged by the Bill a convincing response, in economic or any other terms?
What does the democratisation of education in Ireland mean? Unilateral imposition of State control and the effective secularisation of all schools which wish to receive State recognition? Such secularisation is not the necessary consequence of this Bill's provisions, but it is a highly possible consequence.
Schools will become much more dependent on the ideological winds blowing outside their walls, however inimical to the schools own values, if the Bill is passed in its present form. Is that what the Government wants? Is that what parents want?
Or does democratisation not rather mean genuine respect for the communities which comprise the larger national community, and respect for their right to educate those who belong to such communities in accordance with their ethos, thus enriching all of us? Is this not what a pluralist democracy should be concerned to protect?
Ethos, contrary to what has been suggested by some, is not a code word for maintaining unconditional Church control. It is a subtle word because it is about atmosphere and emphasis, whatever gives expression to the underlying, assumptions of what education is for. A secular school will approach, religion as something marginal, to be handled in private classes for, those who want it and not otherwise making any impact on the institution.
For Christian schools, the world, however blurred the reflection because of human frailty, is "charged with the grandeur of God" and this makes all the difference. Every subject is, albeit implicitly, an exploration of God's world. Human beings are stewards of creation, brothers and sisters of one another, gifted with an eternal destiny and called to live in the world for the praise of God's glory.
Religion is deeply personal - there is no authentic religious faith without personal choice. But personal does not mean private. Real religion cannot be placed on the margins of consciousness, lacking significance for our family, civic and working lives. Religion is a world view which embraces the whole of life.
To treat it as merely private therefore, is not neutrality between religion and secularism, It is the very essence of secularism itself. Does the Bill espouse such a policy? No. But by so weakening the role of patrons, who are indisputably the guardians of a school's ethos (White Paper, page 146), and taking so much power to herself, the Minister leaves schools at the mercy of her own ideological intentions, or those of less benign successors in the future. Why should she seek to do this? Is this what we want?
The crucial question is: what kind of education do we want to give our children? Unfortunately, the Bill's definition of what schools are for is disappointingly jejune. And once again, the Minister's sweeping powers of imposition and intervention in the matter of board structures and curricula mean that she could impose measures by which a "lowest common denominator" philosophy of education and the human person could be implemented in the future, to the serious detriment of our still highly regarded system. - Yours, etc.,
Headmaster,
Clongowes Wood College,
Naas, Co Kildare.